Social network services, such as, for example, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, allow for social interactions between their users. Typically, a social network service comprises a representation of each user, which is often configured as a profile including personal details of the user, and it includes the social links between the users. The social links often comprise “friendship” relations or the like, which are established after a confirmation of the users linked to each other.
In addition, social network services provide means for their users to engage in interactions with other users. For this purpose, the social network services usually include one or more services allowing users to exchange content of various types. For instance, there may be a messaging service allowing the users to send messages to other users, and users may post message which may be retrieved by other users.
Due to the increasing number of social network services and the growing interest therein, more and more users subscribe to multiple social network services. In order to simplify the utilization of multiple social network services for a user, so-called social network aggregation services are provided. Such services allow pulling together information from multiple social network services into a single location. This may include consolidating user profiles in different social network services into one profile which the user can access through the social network aggregation services.
Moreover, social network aggregation services usually allow for a consolidated receipt and provision of messages through multiple social network services the user has subscribed to. For this purpose the social network aggregation service may collect messages the user receives in the different social network services and may present the messages to the user in a single graphical user environment. A social network aggregation service may also allow a user to generate messages and may forward the user messages automatically to the various social network services the user has subscribed to.
The transmission of messages via multiple social network services leads to a multiplication of the messages which gives rise to various detrimental effects:
One such effect may occur, if the recipient of a message is registered for multiple social network services via which the message is posted or sent. In this case, the recipient may receive the message through each social network service and the social network aggregation service utilized by the recipient may present the same message once for each social network service through which it receives.
A further problem relates to conversations which may develop from one message provided to multiple recipients via different social network services. Replies to the message may be sent from each social network service. Here, the sender's social network aggregation service may have to treat the different conversations independently from each other. In particular, the social network aggregation service may not be able to allocate replies from different social network services to one originating message. For this reason, the social network aggregation service may have to repeat the originating message for each social network service to which the message was sent to be able to present the conversations.
Thus, particularly in the aforementioned situations, social network aggregation services of senders and receivers of messages present one message multiple times. This is inconvenient and annoying for the users of social network aggregation services and affects the attractiveness of such services.